Theory of the Grifter Class

Thorstein Veblen would have a field day today. All the conditions he mentioned in his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class are back again -- except today's grifter class is even more rapacious in their grifting than the class that he described.

The deal, the deal... see, here's the deal with grifters: They don't make anything. They don't create anything. They don't produce anything. They are consumers of wealth, not producers of wealth. Every bit of wealth they have was created by someone else.

I've mentioned this before -- about how the wealthy are a drag on the economy because they produce income with their wealth at less than half the rate of the rest of us, about how they don't produce anything but, rather, steal the produce of other people's labor. People like Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines, who isn't rated to fly an airliner, who would have no airline if not for the pilots and mechanics and stewards and stewardesses who staff his airline, but who gets the profits of their labor? Not the people who make the planes fly. Rather, Richard Branson, who simply sits back and grifts the wealth produced by the labor of others. Similarly, real estate developers. They don't build houses. Framers and roofers and concrete men and plumbers and electricians and HVAC people build houses. All that real estate developers do is sit back and grift the profits of the wealth created by their workers, but if it wasn't for the framers and roofers and etc., there would be no houses for real estate moguls to profit from.

Of course, the ultimate grifters are on Wall Street. These people don't even have the decency to hire people who actually create anything. They simply stand in the middle of the movement of wealth from point A to point B and grift little bits of it into their own pockets. Yet how many banksters are going to jail? None. Because in Griftopia, the grifters rule and often grift a million a dollars per day of the wealth that we workers create, and those of us who are actually workers -- who actually go to work every day and create something, build something, provide some service that people actually want and need, who actually create the wealth that the grifters are profiting from -- will never see a million dollars in a year no matter how hard we work to generate things that are actually useful.

Welcome to Griftopia, citizen. Report to your nearest feudal overlord ASAP to be given your serfdom assignment, thank you very much.

-- Badtux the Serfin' USA Penguin

After the Gulch

Thinking about it, I was rather unfair to the denizens of Galt's Gulch, the richest 400 people in America. After all, they have 50% of the assets of America, they can certainly afford to bring with them all the materials and farm tools they would need in order to make a nice home for themselves in Galt's Gulch. A few of them even have theoretical knowledge of how to use these, and a few of them -- in the technology industry, mostly -- have even used a few small hand tools themselves, though not recently. For example, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has actually used a screwdriver. Granted, he was only 18 months old at the time, but at least he knows what a screwdriver is, unlike Cindy Walton.

Still, the end result will be starvation and death for the denizens of Galt's Gulch. Even with all the farm tools in the world, if you've never farmed before the likelihood of managing to grow a crop is pretty slim. And the 400 have no practical skills in how to repair farm equipment, not to mention that they can't even fuel their tractors and bulldozers without paying money to the hated peasants outside the Gulch, which they have foresaken doing because the peasants are just leaches and dimwits beside their obvious brilliance. So it might take six months, or a year, or two years, but eventually the last denizen of Galt's Gulch shall perish from hunger, likely after gnawing the last shreds of meat off the raw carcass of the next-to-the-last denizen of Galt's Gulch (raw carcass because, again, the 400 richest people in America may have a *theoretical* notion of how to light a fire and cook meat over it, but the number of said richest people who've actually done so is not likely to be very high).

So anyhow, enough of Galt's Gulch. So what happens to the rest of the world once the denizens of Galt's Gulch go into hiding in their hidden valley? Well..

At your local Wal-Mart, the trucks come in with merchandise as usual, and the workers unload them and stack them on the shelves as usual. The store managers walk their stores as usual and approve hiring of workers and accept resignations of workers and the store's computers send the day's sales to Walmart Bentonville every day, and the computers at Walmart Bentonville issue orders to their suppliers every day. The supplier relations specialists in Bentonville keep contacting their equivalents at their suppliers to negotiate pricing and availability as contracts expire. At suppliers, the product managers continue developing new products and getting approval from the VP of Marketing to put them into production, and selling these products to Wal-Mart.

Then one day, it's time for the monthly board of directors' meeting, and neither Jim Walton nor Robson Walton show up. The CEO asks, "Has anybody seen Jim or Rob?" Nobody has. "Oh well, we don't need them for a quorum, let's get the reports from our operating units and make any decisions we need to make." And they do.

Ten months later, it's time for the annual shareholder's meeting, where the board of directors has to be re-elected by the shareholders and... err... the biggest shareholders, every single one of the Walton family, are missing. Neither hide nor hair has been seen of them for almost a year now. The board shrugs, and renominates themselves as well as two more people to take the board positions of the two Waltons who are no longer around.

At some point someone asks, "Sayyyy.... nobody's seen the 400 richest people in America recently. Is something going on? Have they been kidnapped or something?" The FBI goes to the homes of the top five people on the Forbes 400 list, and manage to badge their way past the guards and ascertain that the guards have not seen their employer in over a year and that their employer's business manager continues signing their paychecks as usual. Said business manager says she hasn't seen her employer either but assumes said employer is at one of their other homes. The FBI gets a court order to search the home under reasonable suspicion that a murder or kidnapping may have taken place, and find clues to where the Galt-goers have gone. They go to Galt Gulch and find all 400 corpses plus the corpses of their spouses and heirs, many horribly mangled due to cannibalism. The world is agoggle about how horrible it was that the 400 went to such extremes to remove themselves from the presence of their "inferiors" yet came to such a terrible end. And then...

... the world goes on, as it's been going on for the past year without these "masters of the universe". The 400 took their spouses and heirs to Galt's Gulch with them and there were no survivors and they left no wills, so the ownership of the properties and corporate shares that they owned devolves to the unclaimed property division of the states the 400 resided in, which then auctions them off and has plenty to pay off their state's entire debt plus any deficits caused by recessions. New owners take over and let the employees continue running the companies, as has been true for the past year that the owners were nowhere around. In the end, all that happens is that the 400 proved just how little they contributed to the economy, which didn't even notice they were missing until the FBI found the gory evidence of a Donner Party Event in Galt's Gulch.

-- Badtux the Fiction Penguin

Missive from Galt Gulch

"There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers.

So the top 400 richest people on the planet decide they're sick of dealing with the little people, and retire to Galt Gulch.

Day one: Four hundred people wander around Galt Gulch. "Where's my mansion?" Christy Walton asks. "I think we're supposed to build our own shelters," Larry Ellison replies. "I'll just hire some Mexicans to build me a new mansion," Charles Kotch says. Bill Gates mutters, "Do you see any Mexicans here?" Jim Walton says, "Just go to the nearest Wal-Mart and shout 'La Migra!' at the top of your voice, and stand outside. You'll see plenty of Mexicans to hire." "There's no Wal-Marts here," David Kotch says in an irritated voice. Alice Walton looks shocked, and says "What do you mean there's no Wal-Mart here? There's Wal-Marts like, everywhere!"

Warren Buffet sighs. "We have rocks and we have trees. All we have to do is pile up rocks into walls, and cut down the trees to use the wood to make roofs." "But I might break my nails!" Christy Walton screeches, a look of horror on her face. Michael Bloomberg interjects, "First things first. I'm hungry. What's for dinner?" Larry Page wanders by, a confused look on his face. "Just go onto Google Maps and look for nearby takeout restaurants and order something," he says. "Dolt!" snaps Sergey Brin, "We don't have computers here, and there are no restaurants, this is Galt Gulch, not Galt Silicon Valley!" Sheldon Adelson says, "I have a candy bar. I'll bet you this candy bar that nobody knows how to cook in this gulch." George Soros snarks, "I'll take that bet, because my fellow rich people are dolts, morons, and idiots, helpless without their serfs to do their every bidding." Michael Dell irritably says "That's mean, George. Anyhow, the answer is clear. I'll just use my credit card to buy that candy bar from Sheldon, and sell it on the Internet." "Monkeys! Monkeys! I see monkeys!" Steve Balmer shouts, and Paul Allen looks around, "hey, maybe we could eat those for dinner." Jeff Bezos says "Sure, just order a barbecue grill and a cigarette lighter from Amazon.com and we'll have barbecue monkey for dinner." Ann Chambers asks, "has anybody seen my nurse? I feel a fainting spell coming on." John Paulson snaps, "We don't need those little people. We are the masters of the universe. We own everything." "That's okay," Donald Bren says. "I'll just hire some contractors to bulldoze all this and put up a McMansion tract housing plot." Abigail Johnson helpfully says, "I think if we provide a mortgage-backed security for that application, we can obtain a significantly higher profit." Phil Knight says "so do you know how to drive a bulldozer, Donald?" and Donald looks at Phil with a look of horror that says "what, me, get my hands dirty?" Carl Icahn then says "let's do a leveraged buyout of bulldozer drivers." Ron Perelman yells, "Does anybody here know how to drive a bulldozer?" Silence follows.

As darkness falls, the 400 denizens of Galt Gulch huddle, hungry and cold, under the marginal shelter of the sparse trees populating the gulch. But they do not huddle in silence. As they huddle, they talk excitedly about new kinds of CDO's, leveraged buyouts, Internet search algorithms, optimal investment strategies, and the advantages of computerized inventory control. Over the next few days, the denizens of Galt Gulch slowly fade away, until in the end there are only 400 corpses, doomed by their inability to, like, actually do anything for themselves, as vs loot things from other people.

The End.

The above is, alas, a work of fiction. Oh well.

-- Badtux the "Too Bad" Penguin